I quite like the sprint, so my rather boring opinion is to move the qualifying to Saturday afternoon, then slide the sprint race and it’s qualifying forward a slot. I would then have Parc Ferme kick in at qualifying at the some time as a normal weekend.

This would mean teams can and will play around with setup over the sprint quali and race, but I’m ok with that given the smaller point allocation. Also neither the qualifying or the sprint itself are necessarily ideal places to be playing around with setup too much, especially since no one pits in the sprint, so doing too much setup change might be a risk for a team. It does mean those that got it terribly wrong after FP1 can gamble on some setup changes however. Ultimately coming out of the sprint you’d still need a car fit to go through the GPs qualifying and race, so there’s still that to balance things a bit.

The reverse grid suggestion is interesting, but I’m not sure how it’ll work in practice and perhaps it needs to be a longer race then to allow more time to come through the field. If teams feel the sprint is too high risk already, I can’t see the top teams wanting to now come through a field every sprint session. If they’re going to do this they need to pick tracks with high overtaking rates.

If times a concern, they could possibly cut down the time by only checking the areas on the teammates where the first cars were found to be infringing, so in last weeks case the board wear.

Sure, a single team could intentionally break the rules using different methods, but intentionally doing so runs a high risk one of the two cars is selected for review and disqualifications not a light penalty, even if it only gets caught on the one car. For a situation like last week where there’s no real indication there was malicious intent, checking just the board of the second car would cover the scenario where the same setup mistakes is being applied to both cars.

Yeah, removing EE encryption by providers won’t be effective at all. Back in uni throwing together a bit of code to encrypt files and corresponding code to decrypt it was one of the very first lessons that gets taught. It’s trivially done if not by an existing product, then doing it yourself. Anyone wanting to circumvent this will just encrypt data before they send it over these channels and in the end no one is particularly safer for the laws.

I’m all for laws that help protect children, but I don’t see preventing EE encryption as an effective solution at all to the issue being addressed.

I’m struggling to find where I heard about this, but if you post to Twitter (or I guess it’s X now) and tag @Sync, they should get back in touch with you and offer you a bonus 10GB for the positive outreach.

Since I don’t know about where I heard about the offer originally, the next best thing might be my post which Sync responded to as evidence of the bonus. Along with one or two other bonuses which one may have been a referral, I’m at 17GB on the free account which is pretty decent, and certainly not as burdensome as the referral process one has to go through with Dropbox to grow the free tier there.

They’re a great service from the time I’ve spent with it and worth a go.

I think the key question is to ask what about Googles solution is driving them to look elsewhere. Once that’s known it’s possible to work out if NextCloud deployed in house or via a partner is the right way forward, or if another cloud offering might be more suitable.

If those were my requirements then I’d be looking at Synology.

Currently using a Windows PC with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool about 10HDDs into one consolidated pool. Nice way to get a stack of storage and to repurpose an old PC I already had, but for a low effort option Synology would be my pick based on all the reports I’ve heard about it being a top notch option. My PC is fine but when things break you need to be able to troubleshoot a Windows setup, which is fine but maybe not for “mum and dad”.

Just pick a NAS from them that does what you need. Whenever I look at them it seems to be about determine how many drives you need and whether you want a high performance one (to run Plex servers and the like) or a low spec one that just does storage and some less intensive stuff.

I remember putting my Quake 2 disc into CD players. The audio on that games in standard WAV files so the soundtrack can actually be played through a CD player just fine. It was also a pretty great soundtrack.

My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.

In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.

We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.

I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.

To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.

Minor thing but over night both wefwef and Memmy clients are showing the wrong comment score (karma) against my profile, and given they are showing the same amount I assume it’s related to API fed data. Value was correct yesterday. Easy for me to confirm given I have only 2 dozen posts and the value has dropped to single digits.

Not a biggie, but figured I’d report it in case there was some issue causing that. Might be some optimisation around indexing or something has intentionally or unintentionally impacted that.

Otherwise the service feels much more stable currently. No timeouts today where it’s been very frequent the past few days. Nice job. 👍

Sure. I don’t have many enabled right now but some that I’ve used that are probably useful to others

I have a zigbee smart lock that was relatively cheap but didn’t have a sensor on it to detect if the door is open or closed, just a timer built in. To make the lock smarter so that it won’t attempt to lock if the door is open, I’ve used a $10 aqara sensors to detect if the door is opened or not and then combined those with the door lock to say, trigger a door lock after 5 minutes of the sensory closing, but only if the door isn’t opened again.

Another Aqara sensor automation that I don’t use any more as we moved to a house that has a carport rather than garage, but I used a contact sensor on my ‘dumb’ garage door to detect if the door was open or not. If the garage door was opened, the garage light would go on. Could do this other ways such as with motion sensors etc but unlike a motion sensor this would keep a light on until the door closed.

I have a robotic vacuum that I would automatically turn on when every person left the house. If someone was detected returning within a KM of the home, the robot would then return to the dock so it was out of the way when people got home. I really really loved this automation, but I haven’t used it since having kids 4 years ago as there has inevitably been too many toys etc that the vacuum would pick up now days. If your floor is relatively tidy but, it’s a great way to do a vacuum.

I haven’t explored it yet but Home Assistant pulls in my data from my solar panels and battery. In theory I could probably automate some of my appliances based on power generation or battery charge. Haven’t explored that fully yet however.

Those are some thoughts. Right now I use it mostly to bridge devices that otherwise don’t talk together or integrate with HomeKit. Haven’t played around with the automations for a bit, but meaning to go in and have a play with it more at some point. It’s a product I tinker with for a few weeks then let simmer for months before coming back too.

For me it’s a HomeAssistant instance. Great product that has some very tangible use cases that can benefit ones household in terms of being able to implement nice automations etc, and also a great hub in that it supports such a broad range of products and services. As an Apple user in particular its one of the great ways to get non HomeKit certified devices working with Siri/Homekit on my other Apple products.

It also makes installing addons a breeze including other products people have mentioned here such as AdGuard Home (as a PiHole alternative) and the like.

A few years ago I’d say it wasn’t for the average Joe, but I think the product has really matured and is much simpler than it used to be. There’s a strong community out there too.

For multimedia I’d say Plex personally, but Jellyfin would be another option. Good way to manage personal media libraries.

I’ve signed up for a bunch of them and still haven’t decided where I want to make my main.

Same story for me, although I keep coming back to Lemmy.world in the first instance, at least for the Lemmy instances (also explored kbin, tildes and squabbles). Mixed feelings about Lemmy.ml as I think there’s virtue being on the instance the devs run as it seems unlikely to go away, although there has been the talks around political views. From the political side, I do hang out more often than not in tech spaces though so I doubt it’d actually impact anything I’d want to engage in discussion about.

Also have an account with Beehaw which was my first but silly as it may seem, the name of that one puts me off a bit. “Lemmy.world” sounds like something I can more easily communicate to a friend verbally, for whatever that is worth.